RottenTomatoes recently came out with a very nice feature on the upcoming feature films for the period of May to August 2008 (referred to as “summer” in other countries, although it’s decidedly a bit more wet than that here). The article linked above is a lot more comprehensive than this one, but I’m a busy guy and I’m assuming that the people that read this blog will not have the time to watch every single summer movie coming out this year. So below is my list of must- and will-probably-see movies over the next four months, compressed to suit my tastes and summarized to fit your available time:

Iron Man, May 2nd.

Not much to say about this one other than it was a high watermark for superhero movies, and kicked off the season with an arc-reactor-powered bang.

Speed Racer, May 9th.

The only reason why I even mention this movie is because I thought I’d give the Wachowskis another chance and saw Speedy on his opening night. This movie is about as bad as it gets — cliche-ridden (or I should say, driven) plot, seriously bizarre production design, camera work that tries to be funky and just ends up clunky … the list goes on. The races themselves are alright, but I can’t say they’re any more or less memorable than your average Fast and the Furious fare.

Prince Caspian, May 16th.

The sequel to Narnia has been thus far getting some pretty good reviews, and although I didn’t love the first picture, I’m willing to give this one a shot. (Note that the Philippines will be getting this movie a few weeks late; possibly after Indy IV.)

Indiana Jones IV, May 22nd.

I have already made up my mind that I will love Indy IV, and I am counting mostly on Steven Spielberg to bring this one home. (George Lucas, you better not screw me again.)

Postal, May 22nd (likely sometime in mid-June over here).

I’ll see this one if I can drag some friends along with me. I played the video game for all of 30 minutes before getting tired of the tongue-in-cheek political-incorrectness but maybe Uwe Boll can come up with something witty and compelling. Or, more likely, something totally insipid and obtuse, and I’ll laugh my ass off watching it.

The Happening, June 13th.

M. Night Shyamalan’s latest twist-fest should be interesting to see. Say what you will about his recent self-indulgences (The Village and Lady in the Water were twisty piles of crap), but all Shyamalan movies consistently have really great acting and really stellar cinematography. Sometimes, it’s enough.

Incredible Hulk, June 13th.

Please, oh please, Edward Norton, don’t let me down.

Wall-E, June 27th.Pixar makes a sci-fi. How can I not love this?

Wanted, June 27th.

Angelina Jolie as an evil Lara Croft. Well, not exactly, but she holds her guns exactly the same way. The comic this was based on was a brilliant piece of nihilist writing, but I don’t really expect any of that to translate to the movie. Mostly you’ll watch this for the stunts and some snarky dialogue between Jolie and James McAvoy.

Hellboy 2, July 11th (probably on the 16th or 23rd here).

Director del Toro has been churning out some real gems since the first Hellboy (he directed Pan’s Labyrinth in 2006 and produced The Orphanage in 2007) so I’m expecting this sequel to top the first. Mignola’s comic books have always been a bit of a strange brew and del Toro shouldn’t find himself bereft of weird story material to throw at us.

The Dark Knight, July 18th.

There are a couple of things I was hoping for with Chris Nolan’s sequel: 1) Better action sequences (you could tell that Nolan had never previously directed fight scenes in Batman Begins), and 2) No more Katie Holmes. I already got the latter.

X-Files 2, July 25th (probably in early August here).

I remember watching the pilot episode of X-Files on RPN 9 back when I was in grade school (this was in 1993), and it scared the living crap out of me. I followed the show for about 4 seasons before it started to really meander, but I dutifully watched the movie like any loyal fan when it came out in 1998. Now it’s 2008, a whole decade later, and Mulder and Scully have returned. I am awed more by the passage of time than anything else, which is why I’ll see this movie no matter what.

Midnight Meat Train, August 1st (probably on the 6th here, if this ever makes it past the MTRCB)

Clive Barker’s serial killer short story is brought to the screen by Ryuhei Kitamura (known to geekboys as the director of Versus). A match made in heaven? We’ll see. Personally, I’m happy to see this as an uncut, extended bittorrent edition if the local movie review board blocks it.

Star Wars: The Clone Wars, August 15th.

There are a couple of reasons to watch this movie, and I’m going to completely avoid the obvious “Because It’s Star Wars, Stupid.” The first is that I seriously love Kilian Plunkett’s character design (I first noticed his work on the graphic novel Unknown Soldier back in 98, and again in Superman: Red Son in 2004).  The second reason is that the Clone Wars movie is essentially a 90-minute commercial for the animated TV series starting in October this year, which will be followed by a live-action TV series in 2010. Hey, and we like commercials right?

The International, August 15th (probably on the 20th or 27th here).

Clive Owen as an international secret agent. Naomi Watts as his damsel-in-distress. Seems like a winning combination to me. 

Images from Zack Snyder’s upcoming Watchmen adaptation found their way online yesterday, and you can immediately see why Alan Moore has pretty much given up on Hollywood. You can check out the rest of the images here, but the Comedian depicted above says it all. Now, before I embark on this geekboy rant, I want to first say that when I saw Snyder’s Dawn of the Dead, I was thoroughly impressed. It was a great start for a young director; it was creepy, funny and thrilling in most of the right places.

I was less impressed by his take on Frank Miller’s 300, because it showed exactly how young this guy really was. 300 was a song played with a single note, and the volume cranked all the way up. Visually it was quite engaging, but then again so is pornography, or a UFC match. Neither of them are what you would ordinarily refer to as a "feature film."

Which brings me to Watchmen and the dark, gritty stills that they just released of its main characters. Now again, these stills have a great visual styling to them. Very "Dark Knight" in its retro/modern, desaturated, shiny-leather look. But sadly, they totally miss the point of the story, which is why it depresses me a little to see them.

Alan Moore’s Watchmen, for those of you who haven’t had the good fortune of reading it, is a story about a team of Golden Age superheroes, after their "golden age" has passed. They’re old and retired, but some of them continue to work behind the scenes, quietly maneuvering global politics and economics towards one unbelievable outcome. I’ve always thought that Watchmen was impossible to adapt to another medium because of its complexity. It’s got about a dozen separate plotlines that come together at the perfect moment towards the end, and the epic nature of the story can’t really be felt if you experience the whole thing in a 2-hour movie session.

Likewise, you couldn’t adapt it into a traditional text-only novel either, because a huge part of what makes Watchmen so special is the cornball "Golden Age" look of the superheroes. The story itself was a commentary on the comic-book medium you see, and how "real life" has finally caught up with our aging lead characters. Snyder’s images above are disappointing because he’s traded the feel of "old cowboys on their last ride" for chrome gear and glossy leather straps. Sure to please the general moviegoing audience, but unlikely to satisfy anyone who’s actually read this book.

The Academy Awards are kicking off in a matter of hours, and I thought I’d write out some thoughts about the various nominations. 2007 was a a really great year for movies, not just because the general quality was good, but because so many of the high-quality movies were also really fun to watch. My favorites this year, in reverse order:

5. 3:10 To Yuma

This is more of a sentimental pick than anything else. There’s a kind of magic in well-executed Westerns that I find really irresistible and 3:10 just really kicks butt all the way through. Christian Bale and Russel Crowe are powerhouses here, and young Ben Foster is ridiculously intimidating. I had two other movies that were pushing for the #5 spot — American Gangster and Gone Baby Gone. All three of these were about the same level in my opinion, although 3:10’s subject matter managed to give it a slight edge. (And interestingly, none of them were nominated for Best Picture, which is a testament to just how tight the race is this year.)

4. There Will Be Blood

I thought this movie was trademark P.T. Anderson in that you can’t really expect to understand and appreciate it fully the first time you see it. It’s a complex film about a ruthless oil tycoon at the turn of the century, and Daniel Day-Lewis gives a Godfather-level performance in it. The range of this guy is truly incredible — watch him in The Last of the Mohicans before you see this film; he’s almost unrecognizable. If Blood doesn’t win Best Picture, Day-Lewis should at least win the "Best Actor Ever" award.

3. Juno

Director Jason Reitman performs a precarious balancing act with this quirky story about teen pregnancy: Juno is funny without being ludicrious, familiar without being cliche, and sentimental without being cheesy. Best comedy of the year, easily, and some critics have actually predicted that this might take home the Best Picture Oscar simply because it’s the odd man out.

2. Ratatouille

I’ve never liked how the Oscars marginalized animated movies by creating a separate "Best Animated Picture" category for them in 2001 (only Beauty and the Beast has ever received a Best Picture nomination). Ratatouille is not only the best movie out of Pixar — a studio reknowned for making extremely impressive films — but it’s also one of the finest films of this year, and should have been nominated in the regular "Best Picture" category.

1. No Country for Old Men

This one will win the Oscar for sure, unless Juno pulls off the biggest upset in Academy history. It’s probably the most pitch-perfect movie I’ve seen in the past 5 years; brilliant performances from Tommy Lee Jones and Javier Bardem (creepiest mofo since Hannibal Lecter), deliberate and methodical cinematography by Roger Deakins, and dialogue that’s so sharp you could poke your eye out with it. (The Coen Brothers will probably take home the Direction and Screenplay awards for this movie as well. It’s just that good.)

And so, with the success of various sci-fi-laced serial dramas over the past 3 years (and the relative failure of a sequel in the original medium), the producers behind my favorite action sci-fi flick of all-time have brought the Terminator franchise to the small screen, with the mildly-anticipated Sarah Connor Chronicles. The show itself isn’t scheduled to start airing on Fox until mid-January 2008, but I saw the pilot episode this evening and thought I’d write down some thoughts.

As you can guess from the title, the story is set somewhere between "Judgment Day" and "Rise of the Machines," as Sarah and John Connor continue their lives as wanted criminals on the run from the FBI. The cast has some potential: Lena Headey (300) plays Sarah, Thomas Dekker (Heroes) plays John, and Summer Glau (Serenity) plays a high-school girl that turns out to be John’s robot protector. The usual hallmarks of the franchise are all there: two Terminators slug it out in an effort to change the future, while Sarah and John have mother/son pep talks and run from various exploding vehicles.

The particular choice for Evil-Terminator was not quite as good as any of the regular cast unfortunately: Owain Yeoman does his best to create a facsimile of Robert Patrick’s stellar performance in Judgement Day, and he busts through walls and tears apart school buses with a casually blank "robot" look. I have to say that nobody has ever really managed to pull off the "Terminator stare" quite like Patrick did over 15 years ago. (Even Arnold himself was never quite as menacing.) The difference, you see, is that Patrick always looked like he was sizing you up, calculating the most efficient way to break you in half; other actors have simply kept their faces neutral, and imho it just lacks the gravitas of a real killing machine.

The story itself is a tricky thing to review this early on. The Terminator mythology is relatively thin, when compared with the labyrinthine foundations of shows like Heroes or Lost. Everyone knows that John Connor is eventually going to lead the resistance against the machines in the early 21st century, and has been dodging time-traveling robots for most of his life. Apart from that, there’s precious little else that matters. (In fact, one could argue that the essence of the Terminator movies  lies in how the screenplay was a near-perfect distillation of the killer-robot-from-the-future concept. With no unnecessary details to worry about, all that was left was an astounding juggernaut of an action movie.)

Another issue I had was that the SCC cast is tiny, so aside from waiting for the next big machine-on-machine slugfest, it’s difficult to see how this show could actually work from week to week. The Terminator movies, I think, were never written to be drawn-out in this manner. What made them so great was the fact that the pacing and story were as merciless and to-the-point as its characters. Punctuating the action with the usual pep-talk or moment-of-silent-introspection was something they avoided like the plague, but in a TV setting, it’s difficult to imagine how they wouldn’t eventually do this.

Overall, the pilot was mildly entertaining, and Summer Glau is, as always, interesting to watch. It’s not Firefly, but then again, neither is anything else on TV these days.

Heroes Season 2, Episodes 1-4

Tim Kring’s serial superhero drama made a triumphant return to television a little over a month ago, and it’s so far been a rough four weeks for our intrepid band of evolutionaries.

Peter is, of course, alive and well, and not surprisingly, so is Sylar. Claire and her family are in hiding, as are the 3M’s (Matt, Mohinder and Molly). Hiro is off adventuring in medieval Japan, and we spend a lot of screen time tracking the progress of Maya and Alejandro – the life & death twins – as they attempt to cross the border to the States, and leaving a rather blatant trail of hemorrhaged corpses in their wake. (God forbid these two twins ever learn how to use a phone to at least figure out if Dr. Suresh even wants to see them first.)

What surprises me most about Season 2 is how similar the general plot is to Season 1. Peter is once again exhibiting powers that he doesn’t fully understand (owing to some convenient memory loss), Claire is once again smirking her way through high school, Matt is back on the force, and in episode 4, we are introduced to yet another pancake waitress with an exceptional learning ability. I swear to God, it’s 2006 all over again, with a bigger budget.

A couple of things are of course significantly different as well: Claire no longer being a cheerleader is the biggest surprise, although in exchange we are made to suffer through the most stomach-churning high school romance subplot I’ve ever seen on mainstream TV. More than Hayden Panettiere’s celebutante-esque acting style, is the fact that the dude they chose to play flyboy West looks and acts like a third-rate Zac Efron. As before, Claire’s high-school scenes are enough to drive viewers to mass suicides—one would think that Kring and company had learned to avoid that by now.

On a more positive note, the embittered Nathan is a pleasure to watch, and the unfolding mystery behind Molly-the-human-Google’s nightmares is certainly interesting. I guess what I find most surprising is how much time it’s taken Season 2 to really get rolling—only Episode 4 has so far shown any real life post-explosion, and even then we have to sit through almost 15 minutes of a thoroughly sickening romance between flyboy and indestructigirl. (Almost makes me wish we had more scenes of Niki and Micah, however inconsequential those usually end up being.)

All-Star Superman, Issues 1-8

This Eisner-Award-winning new series has restored my interest in Superman, although I’ll admit that it had a lot to do with the creative team of Grant Morrison and Frank Quitely, who I believe are two of the very best currently working in the industry. “All-Star” is both an homage and an innovation of classic Superman, a truly creative cross between the groundbreaking revisionism of Alan Moore’s legendary run on Supreme, and the sci-fi-driven insanity of Ellis and Millar’s work on The Authority. Because it’s a bi-monthly series, it’s still only at issue #8, although it debuted back in November of 2005. Sadly, both Morrison and Quitely have stated that they’ll be leaving after issue #12, but that just means I’ve got 4 issues of wonderfully entertaining Superman comics to go.

Dexter Season 2, Episodes 1-3

Unlike Heroes, HBO’s fantastically clever serial-killer drama starts off with multiple bangs. Dexter’s positively Biblical murder of his brother in Season 1 has left our hero in a bit of a funk; he hasn’t had a successful kill in over a month. As if that weren’t enough, his underwater dumping grounds for his past victims has just been uncovered by the Miami police. Now there’s a superstar FBI agent in town and a task force looking for the “Bay Harbor Butcher,” and just to add a little extra salt on the wound, Rita has finally figured out the “truth” behind Paul’s missing shoe. Michael C. Hall’s stoic delivery is great fun as always, and the fact that everybody around him is kooky with a passion makes this show wonderfully entertaining to watch.

My recent fascination with movie posters resulted in this rather interesting discovery today, while viewing the poster for the upcoming Katherine Heigl romantic comedy "27 Dresses." Cute concept, but isn’t that a direct ripoff of The Illusionist’s poster from last year?

Check out my small collection of random movie posters here. I’m working on adding some commentary to all of them, but I’ve got over a hundred now so it’s bit of a job.

So I’ve finally finished off the final book in JK Rowling’s absurdly popular Harry Potter series, after nipping away at it for the past 8 or 9 days. I’m not a hardcore fan by any definition, but I have to admit, I got a warm, fuzzy feeling towards the end as I came to reflect on just how much time had passed for the various characters in these books. Harry Potter, as I’ve mentioned before, is a textbook example of the Hero’s Journey story template, and for Potter and his millions of readers, it’s been one helluva journey.

** Warning: lots of spoilers after the jump. **

[ Read the rest of this entry … ]

APPLE STORES around the US are set to begin charging entrance fees of $5 per person "to create less traffic and a more enjoyable environment for its customers." Ordinarily, I’d be pissed off on principle, but as I thought about it more, there’s not much else Apple could’ve done to prevent overcrowding. It’s just like parking in Makati; if it were free, the traffic would be horrendous (or I should say, more horrendous than it currently is). Unfortunately, these kind of limiting techniques do tend to create a very "elitist" kind of atmosphere, where only the people with appropriate means are allowed access. Oh well, I guess that’s what shop windows are for.

PRESENTING: The time-honoured Hollywood tradition of holding flowers over naked breasts.
Currently on exhibit: Britney Spears, Eva Mendes and Marilyn Monroe.
(Original images from UseMyComputer) 

RAY STEVENSON, known mostly for his role as Titus Pullo in my favoritest HBO show, Rome, may have just been chosen to play The Punisher in the upcoming sequel. This is of course, after Thomas Jane (who played the titular role in the first movie) pulled out. Stevenson isn’t a bad choice — the Punisher in the comics is an Italian, and Pullo was from Rome — so I guess we’ll have to wait and see what happens. (Oh, and Chuck "The Iceman" Lidell might have a role here as well.)

DESPITE HAVING produced a fairly mediocre collection of songs this time around, my favorite post-punk band Interpol has risen to the #2 spot on the UK album sales charts. They’re also on Spin.

	Kirsten Drunk pretty darn drunk.(Spotted at The Blemish.)
	Possibly the world’s biggest Rubber Duckie. Those French guys have all the great ideas. (Spotted at SFGate.)
	As far as concept cars go, this VR Concept from Paulin Motor Company is straight out of a Will-Smith sci-fi. (Spotted at Crave.)
	The world’s tallest man meets the world’s shortest man. Their height discrepancy was a total 5 ft, 5 inches. (via Laughing Squid.)
	The Optimus Prime Gold Masterpiece edition. Less than 20 of these were ever produced, and this dude has one.

All images originally posted at Highfiber.org.